FINISHING A FILM DURING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC

When COVID first began last March, I was living on the upper west side in Manhattan. My somewhat spontaneous decision to re-locate back to LA before the lockdown began, led me into an unusual adventure of finishing a feature film during a global pandemic.

A number of years ago, my creative partner Bob Degus, directed an independent feature film that for various reasons was never released in the US, and his director's vision for the film had never been fully realized. Awaken follows the story of a wealthy couple fleeing city life as the threat of biological warfare and terrorism increases, and as I was fleeing my big city life, due to the pandemic, it seemed clear that the time had come to share this film.

We had a number of post production aspects that were needed in order to complete the work, and so we launched an Indiegogo campaign and gratefully, we exceeded our goal.

Our idea was to infuse this dark movie with a beautiful and diverse musical score from various cultures and spiritual lineages. Indigenous sounds and a vast array of instruments from South America, are contrasted by a world class violinist, three diverse female voices, and our brilliant music producer enhancing the score with guitar and clarinet. The music is successfully driving the film in a whole new way, and is getting very positive feedback.

The film was originally shot on 35mm film, and so we had another journey of scanning it in 4K and it's been thrilling to see how much that process has improved the picture. It's like a whole new film.

We are now working on the sound and dialogue editing, and are moving close to completing the painting that was started so many years ago, so that we can share it with the world, at last. This has been a most fulfilling way to spend a year of such an unpredictable nature, and as we emerge back out into the world, we'll do so with Awaken in hand.